This is Steven Salzberg's blog on genomics, pseudoscience, medical breakthroughs, higher education, and other topics, including skepticism about unscientific medical practices. Here's where I can say what I really think about abuses and distortions of science, wherever I see them.

Trump's Energy Department just killed jobs in 19 states

It's a lot easier to kill jobs than to create them. It is much easier to kill innovation than to create it. Trump's Department of Energy, led by former Texas governor Rick Perry, seems to be taking the easy route.

As reported in the journal Science this week (and first reported by Politico Pro), DOE has halted its process to award $70 million in new grants that its research agency, ARPA-E, had announced this past December. ARPA-E is the Energy Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency, created to fund high-risk, high-reward new ideas about energy.

Even more alarming is that DOE has imposed a gag order on the program managers, so that scientists have no idea why their funding is being delayed, or it if will ever arrive. According to the Science story,

"The resulting uncertainty is having a devastating impact on research teams, scientists say, and even threatens the viability of small companies for whom these major awards are so important."

Cutting funding that has already been awarded–and which used money that was already appropriated by Congress–is especially disruptive. How can anyone hire new scientific staff when the federal agency might yank away a grant that it had already announced? The Science story described a young Ph.D. plant biologist from Penn State, Molly Hanlon, who was due to start work next week on one of the new ARPA-e projects, but now she might not have any job at all.

The 26 projects, all of them now on hold, were originally announced by DOE in December. Here are the states that are homes to the threatened projects:

15 of the 26 projects are led by companies, most of them small companies trying to creative innovative new technologies. The other 11 are housed at universities, including Energy Sec. Rick Perry's alma mater, Texas A&M (so at least we can't blame Perry for bias). And 9 of these 19 states voted for Trump last November.

This isn't even the whole story. Eight more projects under a different ARPA-E program, ENLITENED, were told in mid-March that they would be funded, Science reports. Just a week later, though, the press conference to announce the awards was cancelled, and the program now appears to be in danger of cancellation.

I'm sure that all of these project teams invested many months in preparing their winning proposals. Leaders of the projects announced back in December were poised to begin their research until the sudden announcement this week, with no explanation, that everything was on hold.

All that Mr. Trump has to do to save these valuable, high-tech jobs is nothing; just let the DOE's ARPA-E program do its work. Unfortunately, this seems to be too much to ask.